Electronic Arts is the most recent publisher to run into serious problems with its online server architecture screwing up the launch of a new game, but it's definitely not the first. Throughout the last decade or so, plenty of game makers have seen otherwise promising games marred at their debut by early problems surrounding game and server performance. To refresh your memory, here are five of the most memorably screwed-up launch experiences to hit the PC.

Half-Life 2

These days, Steam is the de facto way many of us get most of our PC games, and the system provides a generally good experience. But those around for its launch in 2004 remember it wasn't always this way. Even before the service launched alongside the long-delayed blockbuster release of Half-Life 2, there were plenty of people complaining about the onerous "permanent Internet connection" that would be required to play even single-player games on the service (though it's worth noting that an "offline mode" was available after the first authentication, even in those early days).

Despite weeks of pre-load downloads for online customers, when the game actually launched, the authentication servers for the retail version got hammered to the point of being useless for many customers. The BBC reported on the problems, noting the (then) new and unusual fact that "even gamers that only intend to play the game by themselves must authenticate their copy." Forum threads complained loudly about server overload preventing them from playing the game they purchased. As if that weren't enough, gamers who were able to play complained about graphical stuttering even on high-end systems (for the time).

Things calmed down rather quickly, though, as Valve increased its server capacity a few days after launch. Half-Life 2 went on to win pretty much every laudatory award the industry could throw at it, and Steam went on to dominate the world of digital game distribution. It just goes to show you that even successful services and games can sometimes get off to bumpy starts.

Final Fantasy XIV

Launch date: September 22, 2010

This wasn't so much a case of a problematic launch server as it was a launch of a fundamentally unfinished product. Things got off to a bad start even before the launch, when the public beta was delayed to fix "critical bugs." That beta was then cut short a month earlier than expected so Square Enix could, for some reason, rush to launch with a game still riddled with massive issues. PC Gamer summed up the issues in its 30/100 initial review.

The kindest thing that can be said about the Final Fantasy MMO is that it has a good intro movie. That movie doesn’t take 10 minutes to load, it maintains a constant framerate, and you don’t have to traverse a labyrinth of menu screens to play it. In short, it’s everything the game isn’t.

Square publicly apologized and committed to fixing these major technical and gameplay issues, offering early players a 30-day free trial while it got things in order. But the publisher keptextending that trial as the game failed "to achieve the level of enjoyability that Final Fantasy fans have come to expect from the franchise," as the producer put it. Square Enix didn't feel comfortable charging for the game until January 6, 2012, more than a year after that bug-filled initial launch.

To Square's credit, they stuck with the game, slowly adding features and fixing problems with patches even as the title became a significant drag on their resources. The game is now being given the full relaunch treatment with A Realm Reborn, an overhaul that has just started closed beta and is already looking much better than the complete mess that doubled as the original game. The whole debacle seems to have been a humbling lesson for a company that probably figured that extending its popular single-player RPGs into the multiplayer world would be a lot easier.

World of Warcraft

Launch date: November 23, 2004

You'd think that Blizzard would have known it had a hit on its hands when first launching World of Warcraft in 2004. Apparently, though, the company severely underestimated just how many people would be flooding into Azeroth's virtual worlds when the company flipped on those servers on November 23.

In the days after that launch, server queues routinely reached into the thousands, random disconnections were common, and latency issues famously trapped people in a "looting" animation for a half hour. Problems were still frequent by January 2005, when GameSpot reported that 20 of the game's 88 servers were offline for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. Blizzard's Mike Morhaime publicly apologized for the problems and offered four days of free play time for the disruption (street value: about $1.50).

The server problems got so bad that Penny Arcade revoked their game of the year award for the title. "Every week, there is some new calamity that necessitates some huge response on their part, servers are coming down, but if you think that the servers coming back up again will represent an improvement in the basic functionality of the game you’re mistaken," the site wrote.

Blizzard seemed to learn its lesson quickly, and the game was much more stable as it saw extreme subscriber growth through 2005 and beyond. It went on to become the world's most popular MMO by a good margin for years to come. But to those who were there at the troubled start, those lofty heights seemed like a long, long way away.

Diablo III

You'd think that Blizzard would have learned to over-budget for servers after the World of Warcraft launch issues, but the launch of the always-online Diablo III shows it didn't. As millions of players tried to log in on launch day, a good portion ran into the now-infamous "error 37" (or the related "error 73") before being booted back to the launch screen. Those who could get in often faced synchronization problems and random disconnects.

Blizzard initially downplayed the problem, but as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube filled with over-the-top rage (not to mention countless jokes) about not being able to log in, Blizzard quickly offered a formal apology. "Despite very aggressive projections, our preparations for the launch of the game did not go far enough," the company said. "We're continuing to monitor performance globally and will be taking further measures as needed to ensure a positive experience for everyone."

Just when Blizzard thought the problems were behind them, servers were again hammered on May 31, when a new patch rollout led to widespread login errors yet again. By that point, many players had already given up on a game that by most accounts failed to live up to a decade of heightened expectations. Though the game still has a devoted following, the pain of that negative first impressions seems to have taken its toll.

Anarchy Online

The name of this early MMO became oddly ironic as its release became the primary example of how not to launch an online-connected game. In a 2010 interview with Massively, Anarchy Online lead Colin Cragg described the stories still told by the old-timers that were at Funcom for the troubled launch as "pretty frightening. Tales of bouncing servers, crashing and just about everything that is possible to go wrong did." As one Amazon reviewer put it at the time, "the sooner Funcom closes the lights on the few remaining players in this flaming wreck of a game, the better."

I returned to the fray. The cleaning robot had come back as well, so I ran over to it and began apologizing profusely... No response. I asked if the cleaning robot was perhaps lagging and unable to read my messages, and if he too was routinely getting disconnected. He didn't answer me, so I assumed that he was lagged. I decided to take advantage of his poor connection by trying to make out with him. The game then crashed.

Anarchy Online's problems weren't limited to empty gameplay servers—they extended to registration and billing as well. Players reported multiple registration confirmations, problems getting their credit cards to go through, and even issues with accepting the registration keys that came with the retail copies of the game (remember those?).

In a newsletter two weeks after the launch, Funcom apologized for what it called "some significant issues that our customers have been dealing with the last few days," while also trumpeting 35,000 registered accounts. The company also publicly asked the press to "hold back on a full review until we have solved these problems." This was a problem for many of the magazines that had already gone to print, but also for many websites that flat-out ignored the request and reviewed the game in its initial broken state.

While it took months for Funcom to get its prematurely released game into a playable state, the persistence seems to have paid off. Anarchy Online is now one of the longest-running MMOs still in service, and it has attracted millions of subscribers over its lifetime. While the launch disaster still gets mentioned, reviews of subsequent expansions are generally much more positive and forgiving of the early struggles. Will we be saying the same thing about SimCity in a decade's time?

Bonus console launch disaster: Sega Saturn

Launch date (US): May 11, 1995

Sega needed to make a splash with the Saturn after a string of hardware failures including the Sega CD and 32X (not to mention strange side projects like the Pico). That splash came at E3 1995 when the company announced that the Saturn, which at that point had been planned for a holiday release in the US, was already on shelves at four select retailers. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time; a way to cut off Sony's upstart PlayStation before it could even get off the ground. But the early release simultaneously angered the retail partners that didn't get early hardware and the third-party publishers that missed their chance to get in on the lucrative launch. Not to mention that the lineup of the six Sega-made games that came with the system didn't really set the world on fire (Clockwork Knight, anyone?).

The surprise launch also may have been too much of a surprise to consumers, who had been softened up by the kind of saturation advertising and point-of-purchase marketing that came along with the better-planned PlayStation launch. Speaking of which, Sony took a lot of the wind out of Sega's sails by getting up on stage immediately after the Sega press conference and announcing that the PlayStation would launch at $299—a full $100 less than the Saturn. Surprise!

Vanguard : Saga of heroes :This game was so laggy, so incomplete, crashed so often that it was literally unplayable. In the first weeks after launch, there was no updates, and no comments from the DEV team at SIGIL Entertainments. then we learn, 3 weeks after launch that the whole team have been bought by SOE and is moving to SOE offices and the Producer have been fired. We had no support, no answers, no updates until that move was completed. The first real update came months after release but the game was already dead. In every mmorpg launch after this failure, we always hope it will not be another Vanguard.

Star wars galaxies NGE : This is not a full release. In fact, it was a patch announced for the game re-release. The goal was to remove all the complexity from the game by transforming it from a skill based game into a streamlined progression that looked like a first person shooter. The system was thought barely 2 months before release and programmed in a few weeks. It was a complete overhaul of the game. It was pushed so fast and so laggy and so incomplete that 275 000 of the 300 000 subscribers left the game, weeks after that patch hit the market. Worst part of this is that they informed subscribers about this patch, after the release of "Trial of obiwan" expansion, 1 week before release of the patch. The NGE is now teached in gaming schools as the thing that no-one should ever do. (you can look for it on the WEB and google "NGE").

It is funny when I was reading articles about the terrible launches of Simcity and Diablo 3 I actually talked to my wife about the launch of Half Life 2 and how everyone wanted Steam to die a horrible death and how terrible it was that they couldn't even get HL2 to run at launch with it and how on earth would anyone use Steam to play games in the future if this happens every launch. its funny in hindsight now but that was how it was then. Now we look at Steam and can you imagine a PC Gaming market without it? I can't not like today.

As for WoW yeah I remember the many days of free credit to my account, the institution of maintenance Tuesdays and long server queues which made me want to play even more. It was miserable looking back but in WoW's case I feel like its almost a badge of honor now when I talk to the many players who started after BC.

Conan online was the worst launch I have ever seen. I have never seen such a large bait and switch in my life. Features mentioned on the box were missing. Features shown in previews were gone, like aiming with the bow. Multiple missing skills and spells from different classes. And nothing but lies from Funcom. I will never buy another game from them ever.

The Diablo 3 of today is what it should have been at launch. The loot was terribad, insanely horribly bad. It was a auction house game to get to the next stage or use bugs to exploit to get loot to sell, in a very very boring way. Some of the videos about the game was funny though. Now the drop rate is now insane and the price of epics are cheap, almost free except the "perfect ones". But at least it is tolerably hard with a graduated difficulty instead of difficult and stupid insane. It was like there was no product testing despite months of beta. It was just ridiculous. I had given up on the game fairly quickly as it had far too much frustration but have gone back occasionally to find it improved.

HL2 was Valve's first real foray into publishing their AAA title using Steam. While there were definitely problems at launch with how it was handled, they were able to smooth out future pushes because of all that knowledge from previous launches. One issue that hammered on them for a bunch of people was the stuttering and long load times (never had that problem myself, but I knew many that did).

I wonder what types of testing EA did with load -- one can only imagine that specific groups did spot checking on potential load, but it was never pieced together (like a real launch). Future launches *should* be better, but time will tell when they start pushing DLC, patches, etc.

Blizzard/Activision should have NO excuses, period. While they probably aren't reusing WoW/SC hardware, they should know what kinds of user/loads would come online.

I remember the whole Sega Saturn debacle at the time and found it hilarious. Sony was hungry to get into the gaming market and it showed. An easy to develop for console, cheap compared to the competition, and the deep pockets to get developers on board. Hopefully the PS4 will put them on the right path. It also seems to me that Sony is taking a page from the past in regards to the next gen launch. They are proactively trying to diffuse the new xbox launch/announcement, this may be why we haven't seen the actual console and why we haven't seen any details on pricing. They probably showed us the specs because they probably know the xbox may not have the same kind of horsepower behind it (speculation on my part) and to get developers on board. Just like with the Saturn, Sony will wait last minute to reveal pricing if it means an advantage over Microsoft.

Sega made a lot of hardware misteps. Had Sega gotten the timing right with the Saturn we could be seeing a whole different landscape in-terms of the big 3 console makers.

While not as popular as any of the listed; one of my recent horrible experiences with poor game launch was the infamous Sword of the Stars 2.

I still don't think this game is actually 100% playable to what it is supposed to be, but it took about a year for the devs to patch in enough content that they called it good enough.

I keep trying it - hoping against hope that it will live up to it's promise. SOTS was SO GOOD! I really can't talk about what was done with SOTS II...... I'm going to go crank up the old SOTS again to calm down.

Cut 'em some slack guys. Releasing a popular service without scaling issues is almost impossible.

Just because facebook and google pulled it off, doesn't mean everyone can do it. Those two engineer their own frickin' hardware to make it happen, and sometimes you can wait a year or more to get access to the latest stuff (especially with Google internationally).

If a game launch goes south... just put it on the shelf until things are sorted out.

The problem isn't really that it was an abysmal launch. The problem is that the "always online" format is horrible for what is normally a single person game. Multiplayer mode should be an option - not the default.

What sets FFXIV apart is Square's mea culpa and willingness to rebuild the game from the ground up. I'm looking forward to A Realm Reborn, though I never played the first iteration.

I'm currently in closed beta and was also in alpha. The game is pretty much a complete re-working of 1.0 and with that, most of the non-gameplay issues have been addressed (lag, etc) While I'm not privy to discuss the actual specifics since there is an NDA right now, I can say that it won't be the same thing, and that many people who are also in beta that I've talked to have expressed great hope and even excitement for the release.

Basically, any game that launches with significant heavy load on some online server will most likely be a failure.

I don't know how many times it will take for game developers to understand this.

They rely on polling data which shows how many people out there are expecting to sign-up "on release day" or "wait and see, before signing up a few days or weeks later". If anything, the polling methods are horribly inaccurate, and unless there's a better metric at determining just how many servers and/or data centers needed to be set-up before an online game goes live, then we'll continue to have this problem. If anything, the speed at which a company can deliver additional ability to dampen the effects of the load is critical to reputation and first impressions. Some may foot-drag or lolly-gag for weeks before doing anything while others will commit every available resources to prioritize server stability.

Again, you'd need to walk a mile in their shoes, before passing judgement.

Basically, any game that launches with significant heavy load on some online server will most likely be a failure.

I don't know how many times it will take for game developers to understand this.

They rely on polling data which shows how many people out there are expecting to sign-up "on release day" or "wait and see, before signing up a few days or weeks later". If anything, the polling methods are horribly inaccurate, and unless there's a better metric at determining just how many servers and/or data centers needed to be set-up before an online game goes live, then we'll continue to have this problem. If anything, the speed at which a company can deliver additional ability to dampen the effects of the load is critical to reputation and first impressions. Some may foot-drag or lolly-gag for weeks before doing anything while others will commit every available resources to prioritize server stability.

Again, you'd need to walk a mile in their shoes, before passing judgement.

I'm sorry but it's hard to be sympathetic when there's no reason why games like SimCity or Diablo 3 needs to be always online. They made their own bed, now they must sleep in it.

"The whole debacle seems to have been a humbling lesson for a company that probably figured that extending its popular single-player RPGs into the multiplayer world would be a lot easier."

You know that they already did this once with Final Fantasy XI and it was wildly successful to the point that it still has subscribers and even got a new expansion a whole decade later. Most people attribute the failure of XIV to the fact that Square didn't actually develop it. It was outsourced to some company in China.

What sets FFXIV apart is Square's mea culpa and willingness to rebuild the game from the ground up. I'm looking forward to A Realm Reborn, though I never played the first iteration.

I consider this an odd sentiment. In my opinion what sets FFXIV apart is that can't know for sure if your servers can withstand a million users (until you try), but you CAN know for sure that your game plays like dog shit even without server issues. For me FFXIV stands out as the worst offender here because they knowingly and cynically released a crap product relying on fanboy enthusiasm to make them a bunch of money anyway. All these others got caught off guard in a position of inadequate preparation, a position they could theoretically have arrived at in good faith. No such good faith can possibly be assumed for Square.

What sets FFXIV apart is Square's mea culpa and willingness to rebuild the game from the ground up. I'm looking forward to A Realm Reborn, though I never played the first iteration.

I'm currently in closed beta and was also in alpha. The game is pretty much a complete re-working of 1.0 and with that, most of the non-gameplay issues have been addressed (lag, etc) While I'm not privy to discuss the actual specifics since there is an NDA right now, I can say that it won't be the same thing, and that many people who are also in beta that I've talked to have expressed great hope and even excitement for the release.

I might have to give it a try then, thanks. I loved FFXI, except for the major bot problems and a few other things. I bought the collectors edition of FFXIV but didn't play for more than a week, it was just that bad.

I remember having a few issues with Steam back in the day but I was playing HL2 on release day at least. It took a couple hours though. Plus we're comparing the mainstream launch of the Steam platform to a single game's launch. EA has less of an excuse for handling Sim Shitty this terribly. Additionally, people are losing hours of progress over this which sucks.

I think it's funny how EA has been forced to acknowledge the issue to begin with. Their PR machine started by stating it was an issue for a "few" users and then sending shills to forums to downplay all of this. One of them "glassbox" even got banned from NeoGAF.

HL2 was a bit of a disaster, but was it really as bad as the article makes it sound like? I remember being able to play the same day it came out, but I don't know what anyone else's experience was like.

That being said, I feel like it should get some credit for being an early leader in online distributed games. I mean, in a sense, it's kind of like saying that the NES was a failure because the cartridges didn't always make a proper connection, isn't it? 'Failure' on the scale of HL2 was acceptable in 2004, but not so much when you're releasing something nearly a decade later.

Vanguard : Saga of heroes :This game was so laggy, so incomplete, crashed so often that it was literally unplayable. In the first weeks after launch, there was no updates, and no comments from the DEV team at SIGIL Entertainments. then we learn, 3 weeks after launch that the whole team have been bought by SOE and is moving to SOE offices and the Producer have been fired. We had no support, no answers, no updates until that move was completed. The first real update came months after release but the game was already dead. In every mmorpg launch after this failure, we always hope it will not be another Vanguard.

Star wars galaxies NGE : This is not a full release. In fact, it was a patch announced for the game re-release. The goal was to remove all the complexity from the game by transforming it from a skill based game into a streamlined progression that looked like a first person shooter. The system was thought barely 2 months before release and programmed in a few weeks. It was a complete overhaul of the game. It was pushed so fast and so laggy and so incomplete that 275 000 of the 300 000 subscribers left the game, weeks after that patch hit the market. Worst part of this is that they informed subscribers about this patch, after the release of "Trial of obiwan" expansion, 1 week before release of the patch. The NGE is now teached in gaming schools as the thing that no-one should ever do. (you can look for it on the WEB and google "SWG NGE"). Jeff Freeman even commited suicide after being flamed everywhere on the web for being behind the NGE.

It is funny when I was reading articles about the terrible launches of Simcity and Diablo 3 I actually talked to my wife about the launch of Half Life 2 and how everyone wanted Steam to die a horrible death and how terrible it was that they couldn't even get HL2 to run at launch with it and how on earth would anyone use Steam to play games in the future if this happens every launch. its funny in hindsight now but that was how it was then. Now we look at Steam and can you imagine a PC Gaming market without it? I can't not like today.

As for WoW yeah I remember the many days of free credit to my account, the institution of maintenance Tuesdays and long server queues which made me want to play even more. It was miserable looking back but in WoW's case I feel like its almost a badge of honor now when I talk to the many players who started after BC.

I haven't bought many PC games lately, but my vote goes to Max Payne 3. Didn't work out of the box, and required several tricks like run as administrator and in a Vista compatibility mode to get it to function. It's unacceptable that a brand new software would need compatibility mode, that's huge incompetence of the developers.

HL2 was a bit of a disaster, but was it really as bad as the article makes it sound like? I remember being able to play the same day it came out, but I don't know what anyone else's experience was like.

That being said, I feel like it should get some credit for being an early leader in online distributed games. I mean, in a sense, it's kind of like saying that the NES was a failure because the cartridges didn't always make a proper connection, isn't it? 'Failure' on the scale of HL2 was acceptable in 2004, but not so much when you're releasing something nearly a decade later.

It took them six months to get some of us online to run the game. (It turned out that some accounts had to be rebuilt on the Steam side.) Perspective always changes what is considered a disaster.... One thing that I do approve of was that Steam LEARNED from that disaster. They haven't had many of the same problems since then.

For MMOs/Online games, I expect there to be some disaster on Day 1 that won't allow me to play through at least Days 3-5. I've played many MMOs over the years, but rarely on launch day for that reason. I also like to wait for reviews to come through. Even then the first few months are hiccup prone.

So I accepted the fact SimCity was having issues. I also got to play on Day 1 for a few hours. Lucky me. Some people are screaming "Why didn't EA truly stress-test the servers beforehand?!" SimCity did have closed betas, but they were very limited. But even if they did have a true stress-test, I don't think any game can really handle the first day. It's overwhelming. Not everyone plays in the beta, but everyone sure does play gold.

Same goes for D3 release. That was annoying, but it wasn't unexpected just the same.

SimCity is now entering a different phase of complaints. The more people are able to finally login (and there are still some problems), the more people are seeing what a broken, incomplete game it is. The SimCity sub-Reddit has turned from server problem anger to nothing-works-in-this-game anger. And I think that goes farther than any other game on this list, except for FFXIV. Arguably, FFXIV and SimCity are in the same boat. Of course FFXIV:ARR is aiming to fix that and from the beta weekend I played, it's looking good.

Time will tell if SimCity can recover and people forget about this until the next botched release, just like the rest of the game up there. Well, except for D3...

Way back in 1994 this came out, for DOS of all things. I recall buying it, and the "hint manual" (only the 2nd hint manual I've ever purchased) only to find out much later, that half the things mentioned in the hint guide, didn't exist in the game.

As it stood, the game was unplayable, rushed out the door for reasons unknown.I'd like to say I've been lucky that since that point in time, I've not bought a game that buggy/unfinished. But then again, I'm not much of a gamer to begin with

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.